Benjamin Albritton

Benjamin Albritton is the Digital Manuscripts Program Manager at Stanford University Libraries. He oversees a number of digital manuscript projects, including Parker Library on the Web, Stanford University's digitized medieval manuscripts, and a number of projects devoted to interoperability and improving access to manuscript images for pedagogical and research purposes. His research interests include the intersection of words and music in the fourteenth century, primarily in the monophonic works of Guillaume de Machaut; the uses of digital medieval resources in scholarly communication; and transmission models in the later Middle Ages.

Digging Deeper: The Form and Function of Manuscripts introduces you to the way medieval manuscripts are interpreted, conserved, and disseminated today. The Digging Deeper team of scholars from Stanford and Cambridge shows how to analyze the function of manuscripts, the methods by which they are conserved, and the digital means that are transforming the field of manuscript studies. We will look at the development of music, move beyond the European tradition to study non-Western manuscripts, and see how digital methods are allowing for new inquiry and posing new problems. In pursuing these studies, you will study some of the most significant and beautiful books held by the university libraries of Cambridge and Stanford.

Digging Deeper: Making Manuscripts introduces you to the study of early text technologies, focusing principally on the medieval book, but covering other textual objects, too, such as scrolls and diplomata.